I have dedicated this piece to mothering as a specific category of parenting. Parenting is an inclusive word and I like it very much. It’s helpful when I am speaking to people who don’t divide neatly into “mom and dad” sorts of paradigms. For instance, transgendered parents and same gendered parents use the word parenting to good ends. It separates the role of parent from the gender of the person and can eliminate a sense of “this doesn’t fit”, were such folks restricted to mom and dad as their options.

You are a thirty year old single woman. You have a career, a car, a condo and a cat. You are in my office, crying on my couch about how you are going nowhere and you are fearful of never having a life.

I have compassion for this state. There is real pain there, but I wonder why there is an unspoken assumption that the thing you have right now does not qualify as “a life”.

This Time of Year, is weighted with a nearly inconceivable number of expectations, traditions, possibilities, hopes, tragedies…it just doesn’t stop. It is exactly that weight (and its impacts) I wish to discuss.

I am now going to speak the unspeakable…for many people, this is a profoundly unhappy Time of Year. If you aren’t one of those people, that is fantastic but if you are, you need to know, you are not the only one. I might even venture to say that this Time of Year is unhappy for something approaching most of us.

At the risk of being overly theoretical, I feel the need to write this post.

There is a vast difference between the “subjective” and the “objective” as it relates to work in psychotherapy. And yet, many folks haven’t really considered what the differences are and why we need to pay attention.

Let me first define my understanding of these terms as I use them here.

I have come to believe that this is the scariest darn word in the English language. It is also one of the most powerful.

In the context of what I do for a living, authenticity means being true to one’s nature or true to one’s self. If you just think about that for half a second, you realize that being “true” to anything requires that you know what that thing is in the first place.

The following was copied from Lucy Becker, a wonderful Tantrica of my acquaintance. The intro to Tantra she’s advertising here is a modified version of her full weekend course which I can confirm is well worth it.

Her approach links Spirit, Energy and Sexuality in enriching and healing ways. It is far more than a technical review of the Karma Sutra.

A ONE DAY RELATIONSHIP INTENSIVE FOR COUPLES

Our relationships have the capacity to be “heaven on earth” and “a living hell” catapulting us to the brink of despair. When a relationship challenges us is when we get to reveal how we “show up” in life – resistant, shut down, collapsed, sad, demanding, needy, angry, scared, defensive, etc… It is in these moments that relationships offer us an opportunity to deepen in connection with ourselves and the person with whom we are experiencing difficulty.